Repeat the fiction about the legs and the brain often enough over two hundred and fifty years and eventually it comes true. Recite the gospel of brain chemistry, invoke your authority to see inside us and show us the miraculous pictures of our despair, name the secret regions of our brains in a language as incantatory, as mysterious and incomprehensible as a Latinate Mass, and then offer the sacramental pills that will absolve us of our original sin, of the imbalances that are in us but not of us, promise us the salvation of mental health in the form of the ability to meet whatever sorrow we encounter with resilence—illness and loss and the death of loved ones (after two months, of course), our own limitations and failures and those of our leaders, the creeping awareness that we’re suffocating the planet, that living high on the hog requires billions of people to be our fodder, troubles both personal and political adding up to a world broken beyond repair: do all that, and we will line up for communion, we will take the sacrament, and we will be transformed into neurochemical selves, reinvented as the people of the pill. Not only because the drug changes our brain chemistry, although it undoubtedly does, but because it changes our idea of who we are. It’s the biggest placebo effect of all.